Firpo Dethroned

In bars, lunchrooms, paddocks, wherever sportsmen gather, you see them--frayed bravos with cauliflower cars, rakish noses, thick necks, entreating eyes. They catch your glance, they wink, edge over. It is no drink that they want, no sandwich, no news about a pretty thing in the second race. They want to impart something. For these are the fallen kings of boxing,' they who have knocked out champions and never gotten credit for it, who have been champions and are forgotten. Will one of these sidling, loquacious ones ever be a huge brown Argentine with a mane like a privet hedge? Luis Angel Firpo, will he ever tell unbelievers how he was "cheated" out of the boxing crown of South America? Last week, he lost that crown. One Quintin Romero, Chilean, has long thumped his tom-tom, shouted that he would have Luis' blood. The South American Boxing Commission heeded his beatings, his shoutings. Holding that the Wild Bull of the Pampas had not answered within a reasonable time this Chile-bean's challenge, they took away his title, proclaimed Quintin Romero to be champion heavyweight boxer of South America.